FRAMA’s Unlacquered Brass: Left to Patina

Unlacquered brass patina is the colour change raw brass develops once it leaves the factory with no coating protecting it — air, handling and time slowly darken and mark the metal instead of keeping it uniformly bright. FRAMA builds three of its lighting pieces around that idea on purpose: the 90° Wall Light, the 90° Floor Light and the T-Lamp are all offered in untreated brass, and the house says so directly on the product page — "the material will patinate over time, and marks and tinted materiality will occur."

Untreated on purpose

Most brass fittings sold today are lacquered — sealed under a clear coat specifically so the metal stays bright and doesn't react to the air. FRAMA does the opposite. Describing the 90° Light, the house states its approach plainly: "very often we let the materials speak their own language and try as little as possible to change the origin." That's a design decision, not an omission — a lacquer would have been the easier, more conventional choice, and FRAMA chose not to apply one. The 90° Wall Light, designed by FRAMA Studio in 2011, is 15 cm high, 40 cm wide and 15 cm deep, built from untreated brass with a fabric-covered cord, and doubles as a small shelf via an integrated sill.

What patina actually does to the metal

Left alone, brass doesn't stay one colour. Skin oils from handling, exposure to air and small knocks each leave a slightly different mark, and over months those marks accumulate into a variegated, gradually darker surface — the same process that gives an old brass door handle its worn glow at the point people actually grip it. FRAMA's product pages use near-identical language for all three brass pieces — the Wall Light, the Floor Light and the T-Lamp — which suggests a considered house position rather than a one-off note on a single product: the metal is expected to keep changing for as long as the piece is in use, and that change is treated as the finish, not a problem with it.

Two lamps, one material logic

The T-Lamp makes the same argument from a different studio. Designed by Regular Company in 2017 and produced by FRAMA, it's an archetypal desk lamp reduced to a tilting cylinder and shade, offered in brushed brass alongside steel and white options — and FRAMA applies the identical patina language to the brass version. The design won a category at the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2021, recognised for the way its tilt mechanism lets one fixture read as both a reading light and a mood light. Its larger sibling, the 90° Floor Light, follows the same brief at furniture scale — a 49 cm cube in the same untreated brass, made in the Netherlands rather than the Wall Light's China production, but sharing the same instruction that the surface will change with time.

Living with it

For a buyer, the practical implication is that an unlacquered brass piece looks different on day one than it will in year three, and FRAMA isn't hiding that in the small print — it's the headline material fact on every brass product page. There's no separate polishing routine to keep it "like new," because FRAMA didn't design it to stay new — and Objena's general care guidance advises against metal polish on patinated finishes in any case, so the safer default is to leave the surface alone and let it darken on its own schedule. That's a different proposition to a powder-coated finish, which is chosen precisely to look the same in ten years as it did on day one. It's also a different way of buying than most 2026 renovation advice assumes: Habitus Living's recent argument for Australian homes prioritises durability and long-term thinking over fixed, of-the-moment finishes — untreated brass is one of the few materials that puts that argument into the object itself rather than the floor plan.

The 90° Wall Light and T-Lamp, both in untreated brass, are catalogued at Objena ahead of release, alongside the larger 90° Floor Light from the same series. The wider FRAMA story — a furniture and lighting house working out of a former Copenhagen pharmacy — runs through the FRAMA chapter.

Three questions

What is unlacquered brass patina? It's the colour change raw brass develops on its own once it's out of the factory — fingerprints, air and handling slowly darken and mark the metal instead of leaving it uniformly bright. FRAMA states plainly of its brass fittings, "the material will patinate over time, and marks and tinted materiality will occur" — no lacquer or coating is applied to stop it.

Why does FRAMA leave its brass lighting untreated instead of lacquering it? FRAMA's own description of the 90° Light explains the reasoning directly — "very often we let the materials speak their own language and try as little as possible to change the origin." A lacquer coat would keep the brass looking factory-new, but it would also be the design choosing a finish for the metal rather than letting the metal's own life show.

Does unlacquered brass need to be polished to stay looking right? FRAMA doesn't publish separate polishing instructions for its brass pieces, and the products are designed around patina rather than a maintained shine — the marks and darkening the brand describes are the intended outcome of everyday use, not a condition to reverse. Objena's general care guidance advises against metal polish on patinated finishes, so the more reliable approach is to let the brass age as designed and check with Objena before applying any polish or cleaning product to it.